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Mandelman could either scrap the idea or go bigger. Thankfully, he’s opted for the latter.

On Tuesday, he’ll introduce legislation allowing fourplexes on any single-family home lot in San Francisco regardless of whether it’s on a corner or near transit. And the most encouraging sign? Two fellow supervisors are working on their own pieces of fourplex legislation they plan to introduce this fall.

There’s no more time for whining about building more homes on your block. Climate change is slapping us in the face, and we need more people living near their jobs and near transit to reduce vehicle emissions. Plus, as inland California bakes — it reached 113 degrees in Sacramento this month! — we need to make room for more people near the temperate coast.

Add to that the city’s homelessness catastrophe and the obvious need to end exclusionary zoning so more low-income people and people of color can live in all neighborhoods, and it’s clear fourplexes need to be part of the solution to our housing crisis. Now comes the tricky part of figuring out how to make them affordable to build in a city where it can cost $800,000 or more to construct one unit of housing.

And it’s just not the Board of Supervisors thinking about fourplexes. A pro-housing group in San Francisco is preparing a fourplex-related ballot measure and an effort to allow them throughout the state is winding its way through the legislature.

Suddenly, fourplexes are cool. And the likelihood they’ll someday be allowed in San Francisco’s residential neighborhoods seems higher than it did just months ago.

“We’re going to have to make much bigger moves than this to address our housing shortage, but this is a meaningful step,” Mandelman said.

Meaningful, yes. But despite the outsize negative reaction they inspire in people who want San Francisco preserved like some kind of museum exhibit, fourplexes are just a tiny piece of the city’s giant housing puzzle.

Under state law, the city must craft a plan to build 80,000 additional units by 2023 and actually build them by 2031, said Rich Hillis, director of the San Francisco Planning Department. If the state rejects the city’s plans because they come up short, the city stands to lose local land use authority, face fines and miss out on a variety of state funding.

Hillis said San Francisco’s zoning has meant a lot of development over the past few decades on the east side and too little on the west side. The Sunset District, in particular, is block after block of single-family homes and could easily house more people if zoning allowed for greater density.

“We’ve gotten what we’ve zoned for,” Hillis said. “We need to make changes if we’re going to meet our housing goals, and fourplexes are part of that answer.”

Fortunately, more city leaders are cottoning on to this reality.

Supervisor Gordon Mar, who represents the Sunset suburbs, is working on legislation to incentivize homeowners to build up to three additional apartments on their lots. He wants the units to be rentals with at least two bedrooms and be affordable to those earning up to 100% of area median income or $133,000 for a family of four.

While the details are still being crafted, he’d try to woo homeowners into this kind of development by giving them a rebate on their property taxes, giving low or no-interest city loans for the projects and providing technical assistance with design, construction and financing.

He’s aiming for September to introduce his plan, as is Supervisor Ahsha Safaí.

The Excelsior district supervisor wants to allow up to three units on a single-family home lot if one is affordable and up to four units if two are affordable. Under his legislation, rentals would need to be affordable to families earning 80% to 110% of area median income and homes for sale would need to be affordable to those earning up to 140% — $186,500 for a family of four.

Safaí said he’s targeting “the missing middle” — teachers, nonprofit workers, nurses and others who make too much to qualify for a lot of low-income housing programs, but make too little to afford staying in San Francisco. He’d incentivize people to participate by streamlining the city’s notoriously byzantine, slow permitting process.

“Any program that’s going to increase the number of units citywide that doesn’t include some level of affordability is going to have a hard time getting through the Board of Supervisors,” said Safaí in a not-so-subtle dig at Mandelman’s proposal.

Mandelman, on the other hand, said Safaí’s might have a better chance of passing the board, but it would likely produce fewer units because it’s a lot harder to make affordable projects pencil out financially.

Laura Foote, executive director of Yimby Action, a pro-housing lobbying group, is helping spearhead a ballot measure likely to appear before San Francisco voters within a year that would allow fourplexes on any single-family home lot and create a city program to help homeowners pay for their development. She said this could especially help lower-income people and people of color build intergenerational wealth.

But the bigger aim is to end exclusionary single-family zoning that often kept people of color and working-class families out of those neighborhoods.

“All the cool kids are talking about it,” she joked.

Meanwhile, a bill in Sacramento would allow single-family homeowners to split their lots in two and build a duplex on each. A study from UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation found the bill could spur the creation of 714,000 homes around California including 8,500 in San Francisco.

David Garcia, policy director at the Terner Center, said he’s a big fan of Portland’s rules, which allow fourplexes on single-family home lots plus another two units if they’re affordable.

“That provides more flexibility and the greater likelihood that you’ll see more units built overall,” he said.

Sean Keighran, president of the San Francisco Residential Builders Association, which represents developers and contractors, said there’s merit to all these ideas. He said to make any of them work requires a far simpler and more predictable permitting process and economic viability through incentives.

“These types of conversations are going in the right direction,” he said. “Maybe one day we’ll get there.”

Hopefully, that day is coming sooner than we thought.

Kunal Gupta and Joe Ahearn, New Yorkers in 2018, began working on a startup called Withfriends. The idea was to help small businesses build revenue through subscription boxes, where customers would pay a monthly fee for merchandise like vegetables, flowers or shirts.

Once they decided the startup was legit, the two headed for San Francisco. This weekend, when Ahearn finds a place to live and Gupta moves into the Mission District, they won’t be the only newcomers. They’re part of a trend, according to more than two dozen people we interviewed, including real estate brokers, property managers, tech investors, tech workers and others with their finger on the pulse of the local tech scene. 

There are predictions aplenty on how the ascent of remote work will ultimately change the local scene, now that tech workers can avoid the city’s high rents by toiling remotely. However, despite a year and a half of news about a tech exodus — and with it, the narrative that San Francisco has become unappealing for the tech industry — interviewees said that, as California reopens, young tech workers, especially those in startups, are coming to San Francisco.

“You don’t lose the deep roots of Bay Area innovation overnight,” said Danielle Lazier, who’s a been selling real estate in San Francisco since 2002. “Young people are coming back or want to be here and, anecdotally, that’s what I hear about rentals.”

Gupta, in fact, won’t be alone in the city or in his Mission District abode. He’s moving in with four other founders or co-founders of new startups. 

The reasons for relocating to San Francisco are not all that different from those that have been drawing tech aspirants since the late 1990s. They range from the general, more universal appeal of San Francisco to more tech-specific rationales, such as the wealth of venture capitalists here and a network of tech workers to engage with, particularly for those creating a startup.

 “You wake up, go to work, dream about it. Wake up, go to work, dream about it. It’s not work. It’s who we are. I don’t know many other places where you can be what you do in the way that we are besides San Francisco,”  said 22-year-old Mina Mortchev, who is launching a travel start-up after graduating from Duke University in the spring.

Changes In Real Estate

Real estate agent Mia Baldini said she saw an uptick in tenant applications once California’s June 15 reopening was revealed. 

She had two residential tenant applications from tech workers in hand when she picked up my phone call in early July. A real estate agent at Baldini Property Management, which oversees nearly 200 units mostly in San Francisco, she got only one or two applications a month earlier in the pandemic. Now she gets three to five a week. 

A couple of decades after HP’s birth, as the tech industry began to take root, famed developer Joseph Eichler, who believed that good design should be democratic, studded the city with affordable homes that, at the time, were priced to move. He used innovative and imaginative architects to bring roughly 2,700 homes with crisp lines and a focus on the outdoors to the working class. These ticky-tacky structures were part of America’s post-war boom, and helped populate the Bay Area through a unique triangulation of high style and build-by-the-numbers ease at friendly prices.

As creative minds thrived in Palo Alto, Eichler’s homes housed Silicon Valley’s first wave. They even helped germinate the world’s biggest tech company. Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, grew up in an Eichler in Sunnyvale. The late Steve Jobs, meanwhile, credited Eichler for inspiring him to create Apple’s well-designed products for the mass market.

“I love it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn’t cost much,” he said of Eichler’s homes in Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs.” “It was the original vision for Apple. That’s what we tried to do with the first Mac.” (Although Jobs assumed he had lived in an Eichler growing up in Mountain View, his family’s Mid-Century Modern was determined to be a lookalike by a competing developer, which Eichler fans call a “Likeler.”)

These days, however, the betrayal of Eichler’s affordable and stylish vision really slaps you in the face the moment you step off the train in Palo Alto. Two mid-rise Amazon buildings, emblazoned with the $3.1 billion company’s logo, confront you as you enter the city’s main drag. A slew of boutique venture capitalist firms, with villainous-sounding names like Bain Capital or Omers Ventures, sprout not far away.

What you won’t find is enough housing.

Eichler’s Mid-Century Modern homes, prized for their vaulted ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows, now regularly fetch upward of $2.5 million. In an acutely perverse way, Eichler’s homes are still affordable, relatively speaking; The median home price in Palo Alto today is $3.5 million, according to June 2021 Redfin estimates. A lucrative investment for the lucky few who can afford it.

The culprit? During an era of unfettered tech innovation and cash flow, the city barely increased its housing stock. From 2004, when a puerile Mark Zuckerberg rented a home on La Jennifer Way during the nascent days of “the Facebook,” up until today, scant homes have been built for an increasing workforce. Between 2010 and 2018 Palo Alto’s jarring jobs-to-housing ratio was 16:1, with 20,475 jobs added, but only 1,269 homes permitted, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. (The jobs-to-housing ratio is grim across the Bay Area.)

The city’s egregious lack of shelter has even prompted its own leaders to flee for higher ground: In 2016, Kate Vershov Downing, a former Palo Alto planning and transportation commissioner, quit her job alleging a stubborn City Council and skyrocketing rental prices that she and her family could no longer afford.

As former mayor Eric Filseth said in 2020: “You can’t have a functional community comprised only of software engineers and patent attorneys.”

Don’t blame the tech industry for Palo Alto’s enforced dearth of housing; that would be as cliche as it would be wrong.

“Palo Alto has a small group of very wealthy, very powerful people that do not want to see growth,” says Angie Evans, executive director of Palo Alto Forward, a housing advocacy group. “If you go to a playground and chat with parents and grandparents, most people here want to see a living, growing city where we change alongside the needs of the community.”

Evans, who lives two blocks away from the Zuckerberg family in the Crescent Park neighborhood, points to a well-moneyed group that ties together anti-housing coteries Embarcadero Institute, Palo Altans for Sensible Zoning and United Neighbors. (Word to the wise: Groups using such jargon as “sensible” or “united” in their names are usually the opposite.)

“The strongest force pushing back against new housing in Palo Alto is what’s known as the ‘residentialist’ faction,” says Jordan Grimes, a Peninsula housing advocate whose Twitter breakdowns of NIMBY meetings are as legendary as they are informative. (One noteworthy gripe was from a Palo Altan who complained that new housing would bump up traffic, and thus increase the time it takes to get to her second home in Lake Tahoe.) Said housing group of purported sensibility has helped elect the city’s current crop of council members, which includes a real estate agent as well as its mayor, a former Palo Altans for Sensible Zoning member.

It’s also important to not let Stanford University, which has one of the largest campuses in the world, off the hook. Stanford Research Park, created in 1951, led to the creation of VMware, Tesla and SAP Labs, among other tech firms, creating tens of thousands of jobs while doing almost nothing in terms of housing creation. The school’s general lot 8, a vast moat of land and a smattering of trees at the university’s north entrance, could easily provide space for dire housing.

There is an answer to this quandary: Palo Alto needs to return to its roots as a housing innovator

It’s time to Manhattanize Palo Alto. That’s right, Manhattanize, the oft-used West Coast slur that should be embraced and enforced in the Valley.

By mandating residential mid and high-rises, Palo Alto can become ground zero for housing that goes above — way above — its puny 50-foot ceiling for new developments, a law enacted in the early 1970s to allegedly preserve quality of life. Get rid of all parking requirements, an outdated mandate from 1951. Affix fees on new commercial builders to fund affordable housing. And increase the puny 20% affordable housing requirement while you’re at it.

Lydia Kou, the aforementioned Realtor and a self-described “moderate-growth” City Council member, told me, “It’s simplistic thinking to think it’s okay to just start building. It’s not sensible; it’s just rhetoric.”

But even Eichler was prone to the occasional high-rise, like the 315-foot Summit atop Russian Hill, noted for its flared concrete shaft. One of the Bay Area’s best living designers, Stanley Saitowiz, could do wonders given a skyscraper project in Palo Alto.

“I don’t care that much about how tall a building is or the facade,” Evans says. “I care about whether my kids are able to grow up in a place that embraces racial and economic diversity and that prioritizes the people most impacted by our problems.”

As mandated by the Association of Bay Area Governments, the Bay Area as a whole has to change its zoning to allow construction of 441,000 new homes from 2023 to 2031.

It’s time to build your share, Palo Altans. You want the envious sobriquet “the birthplace of Silicon Valley”? Then act like it. Turn your skyline into glorious habitable towers that reach beyond the stars.

And don’t go anywhere, Cupertino. You’re next.

But then came the appraisal.

In two new discrimination complaints filed with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on Wednesday, Robinson says she was lowballed by around $400,000 on the value of her property, largely because she and some of her neighbors are Black. The claims reflect the latest in a series of cases where Black homeowners in and around the Bay Area say they’re being unfairly shut out of favorable financing and historic real estate gains as home prices hit record highs. It’s a nationwide concern that also recently pushed President Joe Biden to vow new appraisal reforms.

“This is our present-day redlining,” said Caroline Peattie, executive director of Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California, which filed the complaints on Robinson’s behalf. “It just continues the cycle.”

In the blur of paperwork and bidding wars that can come with buying, selling or refinancing a home, hiring an appraiser to officially determine the value of a property can seem like just one more real estate formality. But Robinson’s case illustrates how these subjective valuations can also reinforce long histories of racist land use policies and the racial wealth gaps they helped create. Advocates like Peattie are now pushing to change all that by calling for more federal enforcement of discrimination laws and new checks and balances on home appraisals.

As it stands, Black home loan applicants in Oakland are more than twice as likely to get denied as white applicants, federal mortgage data shows. Around one-quarter of the city’s Black residents own their homes, according to a 2018 city analysis, compared to more than half of white residents.

The racial homeownership gap points to what author and Princeton University professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls a system of “predatory inclusion” that emerged after legal forms of housing discrimination were barred in the 1960s. Since then, Black residents of many U.S. cities have been sold a lesser American Dream of aging homes in poor condition, bad loan terms and lax enforcement of fair housing laws, Taylor wrote in her book “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership.”

“The source of inequality is not just in the difference between the numbers of African Americans and whites who own homes,” Taylor wrote. “Even when African Americans do own their own homes, they experience the supposed benefits differently in comparison with white homeowners.”

Robinson’s home on Martin Luther King Jr. Way sits at a crossroads near the Oakland-Berkeley border. In the 1930s, the Temescal neighborhood just to the east was noted by Oakland building officials for its new $5,000 bungalows and pleasant climate. But to the west was a nameless area color-coded red on the city’s “residential security map,” meaning that most banks would not lend there.

“Certain blocks of the area are nearly 100% Negro and constantly spreading,” an Oakland building inspector wrote in a 1937 report archived by the University of Maryland and mapped by artist Josh Begley.

Today, real estate agents are trying to rebrand the neighborhood as NOBE, short for North Oakland-Berkeley-Emeryville. By last August, when Robinson was hoping to refinance, quaint cafes and craft beer bars had combined with the region’s acute housing shortage to boost the median local home sale price to $1.2 million, according to the National Association of Realtors.

That’s why Robinson was so shocked when the appraisal for her 2,300-square-foot home came back at just $800,000. But then she noticed that the appraiser incorrectly wrote that the house had four bedrooms instead of five, and that the house would fall under local rent control rules, which it didn’t. Most jarring, Robinson realized that the homes the appraiser compared hers to were in historically Black neighborhoods south of her property, instead of whiter and wealthier nearby Rockridge.

“I was caught totally off guard,” Robinson said in an email. She couldn’t shake one question: “Would he have done that if I weren’t Black?”

Though lower-than-expected home appraisals are a risk that real estate agents warn clients of all races about, Peattie said race can creep into the process in several ways. She’s advised both Black and Latino homeowners who similarly received low numbers based on comparisons skewed toward values in nearby non-white neighborhoods. In other instances, Black homeowners have “whitewashed” their homes, removing personal photos or asking a white friend to stand in for the inspection, and gotten higher values.

In February, a Black couple in Marin City went public with their story of spending $400,000 on home renovations, only to see their home value inch up $100,000 after an appraiser noted the home’s “distinct area.” Marin City, like Oakland and other historically Black Bay Area communities, was forged by a combination of racist housing covenants and industrial “war corridor” jobs that attracted Black migrants from Southern states in the 1900s.

Even high-profile Black public officials have been caught up in appraisal backlash. Earlier this year, former Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs spoke out when an appraiser valued his property at $70,000 less than what the prospective buyers offered, causing the deal to fall apart.

“That’s money we now are unable to pass on to our 19-month-old and our unborn child,” Tubbs told ABC7 News at the time. “And not because the house wasn’t worth that much, but because we’re Black.”

In Robinson’s case, a second appraisal didn’t help. She went to a different lender who hired the same appraiser. In November, he said the house was worth $825,000, according to the federal complaint. The mortgage lender, the individual appraiser and a company hired to facilitate the appraisal are all named in the complaints.

The next step in the case is for federal housing officials to investigate and evaluate either a settlement or a lawsuit, Peattie said. She also hopes Robinson’s story will contribute to potential reforms like shifting to more auto-generated valuations, providing a range of appraisal values or requiring multiple appraisals. Appraisal industry groups are also offering scholarships and trying to diversify the industry’s ranks.

While that much bigger discussion plays out, Robinson was finally able to refinance early this year. Her monthly payments dropped by $769 after a third mortgage lender sent a different appraiser in February, who valued the home at $1,239,000. She estimates that the delays cost her about $4,000, not including the money she could have saved last year with even lower interest rates.

It all seemed like it should have been so simple, Robinson said, until she found herself in the middle of a new version of an old civil rights battle.

“We just saw four straight month-over-month gains in the Bay Area, after seeing it drop more than 17% in a month as recently as January,” said Matt Kreamer, a data spokesperson for Zillow. “That’s a sign that the market might be on the road toward rebalancing, though it will likely be a sellers’ market for quite some time still.”

Kreamer said the Bay Area is one of only a few places in the country where inventory is up from a year ago — but that’s mainly because it was already very low in 2020. In the San Francisco metro area, only 5,000 homes were for sale at one point in 2020.

“Overall, the main trend we’re seeing in the Bay Area and everywhere is that of people seeking out more affordable places to live, especially as many have become untethered from their offices thanks to an explosion in remote work,” Kreamer said.

For the second month in a row, the number of homes available for sale across the country rose in June, up 3.1% over May, which may be “an indication the market may be beginning to find more balance after long tilting heavily towards sellers,” according to the report.

According to the report, inventory dropped significantly over the pandemic due to an “intense demand for houses.” That drove fierce competition and a significant uptick in prices.

But the report notes that inventory is still low and demand remains strong, resulting in record highs for home value appreciation.

Zillow’s Home Value Index estimates typical home value for a region based on multiple data sources, including seasonal variations and the values of homes nearby.

In San Francisco, the Home Value Index began a significant rise in July 2020, reaching $1.296 million in June, up $172,435 or 15% from a year ago.

“Home values are climbing faster than they ever have before, up more than 15% from a year ago and nearly 3% from just a month ago in the Bay Area,” Kreamer said. “It will take more than a few months of modest inventory gains to offset the demand that is driving up prices so quickly.”

The U.S. Home Value Index was $293,349 in June, a 15% increase from a year ago, the highest increase since Zillow began collecting data in 1996.

The report identified similar trends in the San Jose metro area, which saw an increase of inventory from May to June of just 49 homes. The Home Value Index in the area, which includes Santa Clara and San Benito counties, was $1.433 million in June, up 3.7% month-over-month and up 17% from a year ago.

So what’s the bottom line for homeowners?

“Their homes are worth significantly more than they were just a year or even a few months ago,” Kreamer said. “It’s a great time to sell right now, so if a homeowner is thinking of moving somewhere else … they should be able to sell their home for a premium and have equity to use toward the purchase of their next home.”

But the conditions make buying tougher, despite historically low interest rates, Kreamer said. The continued increase in home prices makes it harder to save for a down payment, particularly in competitive markets where homes are selling above the asking price, such as the Bay Area.

The rental market has seen a strong recovery, especially in San Francisco, where rents plummeted earlier in the pandemic as many people left seeking more affordable cities and suburban environments.

The Zillow Observed Rent Index shows San Francisco’s typical rents have been increasing since the beginning of the year, up 1.9% month-over-month for a typical rent of $2,985 and up 6% since January. In San Jose, the Observed Rent Index is up 1.2% month-over-month for a typical rent of $3,015 in June, an increase of 4.5% since January. Across the U.S., typical U.S. rents increased 1.8% month-over-month.

Typical rents are found by calculating price differences for the same rental unit over time, then aggregating those differences across all properties repeatedly listed for rent on Zillow. The company also created weights for the index based on the latest U.S. Census Bureau data. Find the methodology here.

Kellie Hwang is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kellie.hwang@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KellieHwang